It's been suggested that object based renditions should have it's own thread. I hessitated doing so since I've not seen many folk post such renders but me (and only a dozen or so from me). Still, I believe there could be an interest in this subject as I see there was for watercolors alone. Anyway, I can bet that most folk here don't know the origin of DAP. DAP had it's origins from a cool project called Arcimbolder. Arcimboldo was an artist that created paintings out of objects such as fruit and nuts. DAP, in essense, was inspired by object based art if you will. Anyway, what I would like this thread also be is a thinktank for sharing techniques for extraction and AOP creation that would differ from normal AOP creation. I'm not going to share all that I've discovered over time in just this one entry, but I will share techniques discovered if folk ask. I've created a few (see the AOP thread) of these, but one of the simpler ones was the Nuts AOP. Still, I do like the result and only recently came up with a cool technique for extracting the nuts from black canvas (use to do so with white, but black makes more then enough sense in you understand why). This black canvas technique can be applied to all extractions universally. Anyway, below's my first entry. As a teaser, I'll explain the technique(s) used for both extraction and drop shadow if someone asks, but you have to coax that from me. lol

Black canvas extraction and also adding shadow effects for depth took me a lot of trial and error. Shading though is key for the 3D depth and you have to extract the black canvas for starters. The trick is to start DAP with a black canvas (which means you need to put a black filled jpeg file in the canvas directory. I just made a 10px by 10px jpeg saved at 100% quality for that since solid colors are seamless by it's very nature. Anyway after you run the AOP of choice, I save the result as a PNG file (lossless) and open it up in GIMP. I dup then set the Top layer to darken and on the base layer, I run color to Alpha with black target. Afterwards, I dup the base layer until it becomes solid (usually 5 or 6 times). This trick works because the darkest color of your AOP has to not be solid black (that's the trick). You can auto-adjust the color balance at the end. Not sure there is an equivalent in Photoshop for color to Alpha, but fortunately GIMP is free. lol

Export the finished result in a lossless format (I like PNG if I don't port the result as a PSD file):

In GIMP, duplicate the result setting the Top layer to Darken and also add an Alpha channel to this layer (important step; forgot to add that in my original steps) and run Color to alpha using black as the transparent color on the base layer:

Now duplicate the base layer until you are satisfied with it's solidification; note that Threshold Alpha won't give you the same result so this is they way to do this unfortunately. I know I mentioned 5 or 6 dups, but for the feathers, it took around 15 dups; lol:

Done; below's the PNG w/ transparency result. You can then do alpha to selection and invert the selection and grow to cut out the black outline and paste it back and blur for additional drop shadow (do this quite often) but that's outside the extract from black canvas step.

Something early for the ladies to chomp on (I'll give something even more significant as we get closer to the day). Yes, I re-created my Sweethearts AOP since I didn't like the original. This time I splurged (see details at thread below) to create it.